Freedom is extinguished and a nation is held hostage by its own army

"Polish [is a] nationality [that is] not so much alive as surviving,
which persists in thinking, breathing, speaking, hoping, and suffering
in its grave, railed in by a million bayonets."

—Joseph Conrad, 1911

The silence of the bayonet fell on Poland last
week. To a degree unprecedented in Europe since the end of World War
II, a modern nation was sealed off from the outside world. In the icy
cold of a savage winter, the country's telephone and telex lines were
cut. What little news reached the...